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Reprinted from The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social 
Science, Philadelphia, July, 1917. 
Publication No. 1140. 



THE DISPOSITION OF CONSTANTINOPLE 

By Talcott Williams, 
Columbia University, New York City. 

Permanent and universal peace, for which the world yearns 
and today travails in agony, can only come with permanent and 
universal righteousness. The vexed questions of the hour can 
only reach a final settlement as they are settled in justice. The 
issues involved in Constantinople and its disposition are difficult. 
So far, in modern history, they have been insuperable, because they 
are involved in a larger issue which no nation, large or small, has 
yet been willing to face on any one definite principle, framed in 
justice and applied with impartiality. The question of Constan- 
tinople is not, fundamentally, the disposition of a city, but the 
disposition of two waterways connecting open seas. 

On the open seas, the nations are agreed in demanding an equal 
freedom and equal security for neutrals, or were until the use of the 
submarine and the new application of the old doctrine of the con- 
tinuous voyage, one by Germany and the other by Great Britain, 
have raised disputed questions. In peace and in war, however, 
international law and the nations are agreed on the general princi- 
ple and constant policy which makes the open sea free to all, open 
to all, and protected by all, though the major share of their pro- 
tection has been extended by the English and American navies. 
English justice has, to take modern times, hung more pirates than 
all the rest of the world put together. American courts come next. 
Both navies have together cleared the seas of piracy, and of claims 
like that of Spain to broad realms in the Spanish main. The ships 
of all lands have profited by their work. 

On straits and ways from sea to sea, the world has no such 
agreements and no common concern or uniform principle. Once 
all straits were owned and held at a price for passage. Denmark 
claimed the Skagerack, and England the Channel with an assertion 
of supremacy over all the Seven Seas about the British Isles. Even 
a century ago, Barbary pirates held the Straits of Gibraltar, the 

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2 The Annals or the American Academy 

heirs of long generations of ocean pirates from the red-flagged Phoe- 
nician traders 3,000 years ago, carrying on sail and prow the open 
hand of Astarte. Her emblem survived to our own recent day in 
the marauding flags of the Mediterranean. It had its final western 
legacy in the death's head of the "Jolly Roger," for the mark of 
the Semitic goddess guarded both the dead and the living. 

The Barbary pirate is gone after centuries in which his ravages 
were early recorded on Latin inscriptions on Spanish coasts and in 
Spanish towns in the days of the Antonines, and in the records of 
our own sea-faring churches on Cape Cod, and the New England 
coast at the close of the eighteenth century. The Dane no longer 
demands Danegeld and the English Channel had become as free 
as the oceans and seas about, until the submarine came to make 
or to mar international law as the wages of battle may at last decide. 
The control of the straits will remain undecided, and the peace of 
the waters will be limited and strained by their work and put to 
naught at every channel from sea to sea or from ocean to ocean, 
until the wise rule and principle is adopted that straits, natural 
or artificial, connecting seas must be as free to peaceful trade as 
the seas they join and as foref ended to belligerents as any neutral 
ocean waters. 

This principle will be a shock to many, particularly to the two 
nations, England and America, who first asserted and created the 
peace of the seas from Drake to Decatur and have, at the cost of 
more than one war, asserted neutral rights on the high seas in the 
presence of belligerent flags. None the less, to the principle that 
straits and connecting waterways should be free as the seas to the 
world's mercantile marine, and no more closed to belligerent flags 
than neutral harbors, the world's practice steadily tends. The 
Ottoman Empire, it is often forgotten, adopted this principle and 
practice when European governments were asserting proprietary 
rights over every strait and channel which joined the world's wide 
waters from sea to ocean. Before the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, the Sublime Porte laid down the doctrine that the Dardanelles 
and the Bosphorus should always be open to the merchantmen of 
all countries and always closed to the man-of-war of all ensigns. 
English, French and Russian mercantile flags were flapping and 
turning as the vessels that carried them were tacking in the narrow 
beats of these straits at the very time when the naval ensigns of 



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Disposition of Constantinople 



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these three lands were wiping out the last strong fleet of the Sultan 
in 1827 at Navarino, when the French were depriving the Ottoman 
Empire of the territorial rights in Algeria and Russia crushing the 
last remnant of the Turkish fleet in Sinope in 1852, and so on, up 
and down in a period of three centuries, this immunity for mer- 
cantile flags survived in the Dardanelles and Bosphorus wide-spread 
hostilities, until these acts led to a declaration of war. At this, 
as at many other points of international practice, the Sublime Porte 
under a long succession of Sultans, in its days of triumph and of 
defeat from Mohammed the Conqueror (El Ghasi) to Mohammed 
V, in the twentieth century, has shown a forbearance, a wise toler- 
ance, a readiness to give all creeds protection to which the lamenta- 
ble and cruel massacres of one period and another, including our 
own, should not lead us to be blind in surveying the past or fore- 
seeing the future. 

This ancient principle was affirmed by England in the treaty 
negotiated by the dauntless Stratford de Radcliffe. Still in early 
manhood, in 1809, it was repeated by England, Austria and Prussia 
in the treaty of 1840, and France agreed to it in 1841. The wisdom 
of this practice was affirmed at every stage of this question in the 
Congress of Paris in 1856, the Convention of London in 1870, and 
in the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. At every stage since, up to the 
present war, this has been the accepted doctrine. But in war it 
has always silently disappeared as in the past. The freedom of 
straits has never anywhere rested on the same basis as the free- 
dom of the seas. 

The freedom of the seas has been secured, because there the 
interests of all states are equal. The freedom of straits has not 
been secured because in them, the interests of states are not equal. 
Each country has followed its self-interest. The world's leading 
straits are in the hands of England and America. England holds 
the two gates of the Mediterranean, Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. 
The United States holds the Panama Canal. Each country has 
talked the neutrality of other straits and acted and enacted control 
of its own. Gibraltar was seized July 24, 1704, by a coup de main 
when England had not declared war on Spain, though hostilities 
over the Spanish succession had begun in Flanders with France. 
The attacking fleet was English and Dutch, but Admiral Sir George 
Rooke hoisted the English flag above the Rock and there it has 



4 The Annals of the American Academy 

been ever since, controlling the navigation of the straits, never 
more completely than today. The Suez Canal began neutral in 
peace and in war, belligerent ships being excluded. Arabi Pasha 
took these pledges at their face value and lost Egypt to the Egyp- 
tians, whose labor built the canal. The Sublime Porte tried to 
apply to it the "ancient principle," which had guided the policy 
of the Ottoman Empire in the two water-ways indispensable to the 
safety of the Turkish capital ; but the first breath of war destroyed 
guaranties signed and sealed, not on one but several "scraps of 
paper." 

The Panama Canal began neutral. It is today under the 
complete control of the United States. No administration will 
permit any other disposition in the present posture of the world's 
governance. It is fortified. It will be defended against all comers. 
All vessels pay the same dues but they are not under the same rights 
and they never will be, while international rights have no protection 
by land or by sea but force. 

England and the United States have each an immediate and 
direct interest — one in Gibraltar and Suez, and the other in Panama, 
greater than any other land, one by its tonnage, and Indian empire, 
and the other by its territory, its trade and its twin coasts con- 
nected by the rift in the American Isthmus. Each is powerful 
enough to enforce this right against all comers. Neither will yield 
either strait. But as long as these straits are so held, no country 
dependent on a strait will be satisfied or can be satisfied by any 
control, short of that which broods an ever present power, at Gibral- 
tar, Suez, and Panama. The instant that power weakens, some 
other flag will fly over each strait. 

Unfortunately, instead of being early claimed by one strong 
power with special and particular rights, the Dardanelles and Bos- 
porous are equally needed by two strong powers and are necessary 
to the very existence of the empire which has so long held them. 
Neither Russia nor the Teuton alliance can treat as negligible the 
control of these straits. If the Mississippi flowed not into a gulf, 
but a closed sea, whose exits were the Panama Canal into the Pacific, 
and the Windward Passage into the Atlantic, we would never trust 
the key of either in the hands of any power, weak or strong. The 
straits which separate Europe and Asia are the real mouths of the 
Danube on one side, and on the other of the Dneiper, the Don and 



Disposition of Constantinople 5 

the Volga, connected with the Don by the canal from Kamgskin to 
Rasponiskata. 

If Turkey has remained in its present control of this access 
to the mouths of these streams, through the Black Sea, it is because 
neither Russia nor its Teuton neighbors were strong enough to 
seize these straits against United Europe. They cannot today. 
Neither will ever be satisfied with the other. 

These two powers are evenly matched as to each other. They 
have the same conflict as to landways as to waterways. Neither 
Russia nor the Teutonic powers can leave the control of the one 
practicable railroad across the Balkans from Belgrade to Salonica 
to chance. They can no more permit a weak power like Serbia to 
control one end of this rail route to the Aegean, to the Suez Canal, 
and to the world's commerce, or another weak power like Greece 
to control the other end at Salonica, any more than we could per- 
mit a weak power like Venezuela to hold the key to our ocean door. 
No strong power can safely permit this, if it can help itself, and no 
strong power will if it can do better, as witness the eligible vantage 
sites occupied by England. 

The question of Constantinople is really the question, there- 
fore, not of an ancient city or even of an imperial capital. It is 
the question of adjusting and securing freedom of access for a popu- 
lation of 260,000,000 in the Teutonic Alliance, Russia and the Bal- 
kan States by railroad lines and two straits, to the Mediterranean 
and the commerce of the world. 

The states in our Union are by every possible measure far 
more homogeneous than the group of lands, tongues and races which 
need and must have free impartial passage over these lands and 
water-ways to the South. But for the general authority over for- 
eign and interstate commerce by land and water possessed by the 
federal government, our own states would have plundered each 
other whenever one of them had control of any eligible land or 
water route. New York and New Jersey both levied tribute on 
passenger and freight traffic two generations ago, one by the head 
tax on the Camden and Amboy, and the other by rates on the Erie 
Canal, rates which paid off the capital cost of the water-way in 
about 40 years, with interest. 

Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Balkan States can- 
not possibly trust each other with the control of these great arteries 



6 The Annals of the American Academy 

of commerce summed in the Constantinople question. It is today- 
impracticable to create any joint authority to regulate interstate 
commerce in this area, though the Danube Commission is a step 
in this direction, and the treaty agreements as to the Balkan rail- 
ways another. It was a difficult task for us to provide in our 
constitution for the distant regulation of commerce for a people, 
speaking one tongue, and a majority of one common origin. The 
solution of such a problem in East Europe has been beyond the 
political possibilities of the present and probably of the future. The 
Republic of Russia might accomplish this, if it dealt with republics 
in Germany, Austria and Hungary, but even Russia has only taken 
the first stage in the new Pilgrim's Progress to democracy, and the 
Slough of Despond may not be distant. 

Were all the lands involved republics, a federation might come. 
In democracy, and in democracy alone lies the peaceful solution of 
the contentious problems of international affairs. What imperial 
governments at Berlin, Vienna, and Petrogad could never accom- 
plish and could never be trusted to control or accomplish by the 
smaller kingdoms of the Balkans, could be done by federated states, 
with no ambition for conquest, and no motive for annexation. If 
the Germanic States were once united in a Federation of Germany 
in which the Prussian conquests of the past century recovered the 
autonomy once enjoyed by the Hanover and the rest; if the Slav 
and non-Slav States of the Balkans were federated, if the old inte- 
gers of rapacious Russian conquest reappeared in a federated repub- 
lic, these peaceful federations, German, Russian, Central Slav, South 
Slav and non-Slav, from Hungary to the Ottoman Republic, could 
control and regulate these landways and waterways, their rail- 
roads and the twin straits, on common and mutual principles pro- 
tecting the commerce and safety of all. Today, this seems a mere 
dream; but it is both more probable and more possible than before 
the events of the past three years. Empires can never be trusted. 
Federated republics by their nature and organization are peaceful 
and loyal. At all events the inevitable choice is between one great 
"Central Europe," dominating all between the Baltic and the 
North Sea, and the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and a group of 
federated self-governing lands. 



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